Twan Janssen: Index of Cloudless Skies
One thing we love about our client Heden in The Hague — apart from the cordial people, intimate atmosphere and super good coffee — is that they really let us explore the boundaries of their series. So when they asked whether we wanted to design an artist’s book accompanying the exhibition of Twan Janssen, we were happy to work with them yet again. Twan’s idea for the book sounded great: A series of 16 collages of cloudless skies, sourced from magazines.
What can we say, initially we had the hardest time with it. While the collages themselves looked great, we couldn't translate them into a book. Everything we tried resulted in a boring little book. Until we listened to that conversation of John Cage with Morton Feldman again, where he reminds us:
“If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four, after four try it for eight, et cetera, you eventually find it isn’t boring. People are constantly complaining, almost every day… Things aren’t boring. Our music isn’t boring.”
So we did some creative math, begged printers and disgruntled binders, until we had magically squared the initial sixteen collages to a meditation on 256 (non-repeating!) pages that did Twan’s concept, and the publication’s title, justice.
256 pp, 22.6×15.8 cm; for Heden, The Hague, 2010
